Bill T asks for historical context of severity of bee kills from pesticides:

This is the reason that I asked Larry at Wicwas Press to reprint the Johansen and Mayer Pollination Protection Handbook, and why in our online Journeyman class we require everyone to read it from front to back.  


I cover this topic next week in our current class.  My first two questions:  1) what constitutes a bee kill, since the handbook lists numbers of bees dead in front of hive as an indicator of severity of kill (it's not a few bees), and 2) what was the level of bees losses in the worst decade before neonics?



The answers are that a few dead bees in front of a hive is not necessarily a bee kill, and that in the pre-neonic days  losses, bee losses were counted as numbers of colonies dead or dying, not as guesstimates of the numbers of bees themselves killed.


Headlines these days proclaim - millions of bees killed!!!  Numbers of colonies are seldom mentioned.  


Dig down, and one will find these days that the numbers are often a few, dozens, maybe a few hundred colonies.  


For all of the reports of bee kills in the corn belt of the USA, we found most consisted of some colonies in occasional  apiaries, although we actually lost two colonies in testing of planter dust, and the colonies had been exposed as confirmed by chemical analysis.  In our case, the incident strangely occurred after a snow storm and before any planting.  We're reasonably sure we have a testable situation - the suspected source(s) has to do with the initial treatment and transport of the product itself, prior to being used for planting.








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